OUT May/June 2022

The first time I marched in a Pride parade, I was 25. The New York governor had just signed the state’s marriage equality act into law, and NYC was quite literally exploding with rainbow flags and confetti. My boyfriend and I walked hand in hand down the length of Manhattan until our arms hurt from waving and holding up celebratory signs, which read, “Thank You, Governor Cuomo!” (Happier times for us all, indeed.) Afterward, we danced the night away on the streets of the West Village. We were exhausted, delirious, and in awe of the history happening around us and the sheer joy of Pride itself. That day in 2011 — and indeed, my life, up until that point — felt like a march of progress, moving inexorably forward toward…

When veteran comic Margaret Cho was approached for the rom-com Fire Island — from writer Joel Kim Booster and director Andrew Ahn, with a cast of queer Asian men — she was proud to lean into what she calls her “Joan Collins phase.” “Do I get to be their guest?” she self-queried, perhaps picturing a dramatic entrance in a wide-brimmed hat. “Like when Bette Davis was on Hotel?” Indeed, Cho’s lesbian charater Erin is the doyenne of queers in the film that stars Booster as Noah, a handsome young gay man who dons his Pride and Prejudice Elizabeth Bennet persona and sidelines his Fire Island hook-up plans until he helps his friend Howie (Bowen Yang) get laid. Banished from the lesbian enclave of Cherry Grove for reasons that may include arson and…

Andrew Ahn has the fall of Quibi to thank for being Fire Island’s director. The gay filmmaker — known for moving dramas that center on Asian-American families like Spa Night and Driveways — had previously interviewed for the project when it was set to be released on the short-lived, short-form streaming platform. He didn’t get the job at the time. But Quibi’s collapse and the production’s move to Searchlight Pictures for a feature-length release sparked a search for a new director. Fortuitously, this became Ahn. “It just felt very gratifying,” says Ahn, who was drawn to the groundbreaking screenplay by writer and star Joel Kim Booster for its celebration of queer Asian-American friendship. This topic is “so much of who I am and what I’m about,” he says. “And so, to have…

Downton Abbey: A New Era holds some surprises but also promises the qualities audiences know and love about the Downton franchise — the iconic characters, the upstairs and downstairs drama, and the queer inclusivity. The new film finds some of the Crawley family and their servants journeying to the south of France to inspect a villa that Dowager Countess Violet Crawley (Maggie Smith) has mysteriously inherited, while others stay behind at the abbey to deal with a film crew shooting there. Among those involved in the production is Guy Dexter, a closeted gay movie star played by Dominic West. As Guy drops hints about his sexual identity, mostly through exchanges with gay butler Thomas Barrow (Robert James-Collier), the portrayal continues the tradition of queer inclusion in projects from Downton creator and writer…

It’s not an easy time to release a film featuring a gay Cold War love story between two members of the Soviet Air Force. On one side of the fence are blockades from countries like Russia that would deem it “gay propaganda,” and thus ban it from screening. And now, following the invasion of Ukraine, there are entities that reject any content centered on Russian characters. Firebird, set for an international release April 29, is walking this political and cultural tightrope. In a recent Zoom from Estonia, star Tom Prior (Kingsman: The Secret Service) stresses that the film is in fact a British-Estonian coproduction. But regardless, he finds a blanket ban “extraordinary” because “Russian culture is just so phenomenal. And we can’t just write that off.” Additionally, in an era when “don’t…

This July, it will have been exactly three years since I took on the role of executive director of the 40-year-young organization we know as Outfest. As the first CEO of color, a local Angeleno, and as someone with limited experience working within the microcosm world of film festivals, I was giddy with what I might discover upon examining its history. Most of my personal memories with Outfest took place attending its namesake festival in the mid-to-late ’90s and early 2000s as a fresh-faced film school graduate. In preparation of our 40th-anniversary celebration, I found myself diving down an archival rabbit hole encapsulating decades of LGBTQ+ culture. Names like Larry Horne, Gus Van Sant, Jamie Babbit, and Jim Fall, and the premieres of iconic queer cinema titles like Mala Noche, But…